


Polymorph

by yfere



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: M/M, Spiders, The Once and Future King References, animal!Caleb, because I really love that book, mentions of various bugs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-24
Updated: 2019-06-24
Packaged: 2020-05-18 20:13:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19341805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yfere/pseuds/yfere
Summary: Caleb likes hanging about the Xhorhaus as an animal almost more, it seems, than hanging about as a human. And Caduceus is very good at catching him when he's doing it.





	Polymorph

**Author's Note:**

> I mean, I can't just NOT do an animal!Caleb fic. It's far too fun an idea to pass up. Let him live his druidic dreams.

A familiar orange form leapt out from the mossy undergrowth of the garden to pounce on Caduceus’ boot. In all respects, the cat _looked_ like Frumpkin—same soft orange ears, same round blue eyes, same stripes, same spots. But Caduceus knew with a bright flash of certainty that this was _not_ Frumpkin, nor was it Caleb looking through Frumpkin, nor, Caduceus supposed, a stray cat that just happened to look a great deal like Frumpkin. What this cat _was_ , was Caleb, in what amounted to a kind of furry disguise, cheerfully batting at the loose thread Caduceus had plucked from his fraying sleeve.

And why _did_ he know? Beau had been demanding explanations of that kind lately, when street vendors lied to them, when he saw through her bluffs at cards. _How am I supposed to get better at these things if you can’t tell me what I’m watching out for?_ she kept saying. He admired the effort she was making, trying to catch lies before he did, contorting her face to imitate Fjord’s while she “raised,” whatever that was. So he wanted to help, and tried to pay more attention to that sort of thing. But sometimes it was hard to explain exactly why he knew what he knew. He just— _knew_.

Caleb, apparently bored of the thread, pushed his head against Caduceus’ calf, before leaping up into his lap and purring with enthusiasm. Like Frumpkin, like an ordinary cat, except—

After some minutes, he thought he had it.

“You’ve been very sneaky, Mr. Caleb,” he said amiably. The purring grew louder, but the way the cat stiffened minutely underneath the hand he’d draped over it told him he was bluffing, trying to look innocent. And while Caduceus knew very well that animals lied, he'd never known a cat to lie in _this_ way.

“You never send Frumpkin to me,” Caduceus explained. “Not when I’m alone. I don’t disagree with you, either. I think you have very good judgment in who you choose, for that.” What he didn’t say was how the realization filled him with a quiet thrill. Frumpkin was meant to help the others, and of course Caduceus didn’t need help like they did. But if he were to guess, if he were to place some meaning to it being Caleb here, right now—

Caleb stopped purring and raised his head to meet his eyes. He looked reproachful, an expression not unlike the one he wore when someone interrupted him mid-spell, or the time Fjord spilled a tankard of ale over his books. It was strange to see that expression with the addition of fur and whiskers. Stranger still to see it directed at _him_.

And as Caleb jumped down from his lap, he felt a very similar feeling, cooling the warmth that had been lapping within him. “Now, no one’s saying you have to leave,” he said.

Caleb, tail lashing back and forth, seemed to disagree. He bounded around the corner, and vanished.

***

The next time, it was a beetle. One of Caduceus’ own beetles, in fact, and he had to marvel at Caleb’s attention to detail. He’d replicated them perfectly—the green metallic sheen of the elytra, the quirk of the tarsi. He must have at some point identified the exact species, for besides the appearance he’d also managed the toxin, if the familiar faint prickle as he crawled across Caduceus’ arm was anything to go by. But despite all that, it was much easier to identify what was off this time.

“The trouble is,” he said, letting Caleb crawl onto his finger and lifting him towards his face, “my beetles know never to leave my staff unless I call them, Mr. Caleb. But that’s no reason for you not to stay anyway.”

Caleb flew up from his fingertip, and for a moment Caduceus worried he was going to be left again, before Caleb landed on his nose. He sucked in a delighted breath as Caleb settled, one that shifted into a gasp of pain as the faint prickle built into acute, searing pain. Apparently, Caleb has no compunctions about using the blistering agent these beetles secreted on Caduceus himself. He reached up to smack the beetle, but Caleb seemed to anticipate it, darting from just between his fingers and up towards a bottle of daylight hung closely to the lowest branch of their tree.

“That’s just rude,” Caduceus said. His nose had swollen so he sounded congested—like a foghorn, Clarabelle used to say. They used to tell him they taught him healing because his sickliness was annoying.

The urge to take vengeance was instant and strong, and—unbalancing. Unexpected. He knew just the kinds of spells that could bring Caleb plummeting to the ground, and it wasn’t like he couldn’t patch him up after. But at the same time he wasn’t sure whether this was a part of himself he cared to reveal, and in his moment of hesitation, Caleb slipped away into the darkness.

***

After that, Caleb took on even more shapes. Frogs and turtles and fish when Caduceus installed a pond, snails, fleas, bees, bats, and on the rare occasion, a bird. Enough shapes and with enough frequency that Caduceus was sure he didn’t always catch Caleb when he did it. And he no longer always told Caleb when he had.

He learned that Caleb paid attention, not just to the ecosystem Caduceus cultivated on the rooftop, but the incidental ecosystems, that crept in on the rest of the house. Sometimes he meant to cause trouble—a rat getting into the grain bags, a jackdaw building a nest in the chimney, a moth gnawing through his sleeve. Other times, he thought Caleb meant to help him—a woodlouse to alert him a beam over their hot tub was rotting, a maggot to tell him that the meat was spoiled and he shouldn’t allow Beauregard to eat it. Once, he took the shape of a carpenter ant, and with a studied innocence led him to the beginnings of an infestation. The rest of the ants treated him like one of their own, and this is what impressed Caduceus, above all else.

“Well, you’ve convinced me not to doubt your ability to infiltrate,” he admitted. They’d caught them early enough it wouldn’t be too much effort to remove the rest of them. “It’s very heartening, actually. It makes me feel better about what we’re doing here.”

“Defending the home, I see,” he said a few days later, when one of Caleb’s webs—he was a spider, now—caught what was unmistakably a bed bug. Caduceus might have looked around for the source of this new infestation, but for now he preferred to watch Caleb as he delicately made his way over to feed on the creature. He wondered if Caleb preferred killing in this way, liked it better than the ways they usually killed others. It was simpler when it was for a meal, Caduceus supposed, though in a way they were doing this for their meals as well. There were only a few more steps to the process.

“One of my favorite stories when I was younger,” he said, “was about a wizard who was teaching a boy how to become a king. He turned the boy into all sorts of animals, so he could learn about their societies, their ways of thinking about things and what their leadership looked like. I wonder—is it like that for you? What kinds of things are you learning, here?”

Caleb finished his meal and repaired his web, before retreating to a shadowed corner to wait for the next. Caduceus asked one of his beetles—just one—to allow himself to be ensnared in the web. He couldn’t explain exactly why he did it, why he’d make this offering. He couldn’t name the feeling he had, watching Caleb carefully tuck it in to end its thrashing, begin his meal anew.

Caduceus considered the process of the feeding—liquefying an insect from the inside out, turning their brains and their hearts into a slurry to be sucked into one’s own self and consumed. A strange kind of intimacy. His own heart clenched.

He remembered a time when Caleb was a guppy, and helped a mother eat her own fry. It wasn’t the sort of thing Caduceus expected—most of the time when he caught Caleb, it was in the ways he acted a little unlike the animals around him. He knew most people had ideas about parents, and children, ideas about what was right and what was wrong, and he didn’t expect Caleb to take the fish’s part. There was so much he didn’t expect, didn’t quite understand about him. Maybe he wanted to learn, too. Maybe he—

“The wizard and the boy both were animals together, at least at first,” he said. “You’re by yourself. It seems a shame.”


End file.
